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Comment by leveraction | Hacker News Reader

The basic idea is that rights are given by God, as opposed to privileges granted by the legislator. A legislator may grant or revoke privileges at any time. A legislator may not lawfully take away a right which it did not grant in the first place. At least that is the theory. In real life, the water gets pretty muddy. This is a very US perspective of course.

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That's a prescriptive view of what the rights should be. According to a more descriptive view, rights are just social constructs with an effective enforcement mechanism. That mechanism is often regulated by laws, which means the legislator can effectively create new rights and revoke old ones.

My pet hypothesis is that the US perspective is prescriptive, because the ability of the state to enforce the rights has not been seriously compromised in a long time. The rest of the world is more familiar with the idea that the guy with a bigger gun may one day show up and take your rights away.

The term is certainly ambiguous - I don't think anyone would argue that the right to legal counsel is 'God-given' and people arguing for universal single-payer healthcare aren't saying that the right to access a national healthcare system is an innate human freedom. And many things we call 'rights', like voting or owning a gun, can be revoked by the government under certain conditions.

In practice in the U.S. we pretty much call things 'rights' any time we believe that people should have them by default.

It's a tangent, but you can also subdivide rights into two categories: positive and negative freedoms.

Positive freedom is a right to do something. (e.g. free speech) Negative freedom is a right to be free of something (e.g. violence)

Actually, it just occurred to me that free speech could be categorized as both: positive freedom to engage in speech and negative freedom to be free of government-based silence of that speech. Interesting.

Edit: I guess this is saying the same thing as 'User23 with so many words; "privileges and immunities" are probably better terms to use.

The can't be created, but legislation can certainly protect rights.

Privileges and immunities are the analog to rights that legislation can create.

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